In one life she only ate toast.

In one life she went to Oxford and became a lecturer in Philosophy at St Catherine’s College and lived by herself in a fine Georgian townhouse in a genteel row, amid an environment of respectable calm.

In another life Nora was a sea of emotion. She felt everything deeply and directly. Every joy and every sorrow. A single moment could contain both intense pleasure and intense pain, as if both were dependent on each other, like a pendulum in motion. A simple walk outside and she could feel a heavy sadness simply because the sun had slipped behind a cloud. Yet, conversely, meeting a dog who was clearly grateful for her attention caused her to feel so exultant that she felt she could melt into the pavement with sheer bliss. In that life she had a book of Emily Dickinson poems beside her bed and she had a playlist called ‘Extreme States of Euphoria’ and another one called ‘The Glue to Fix Me When I Am Broken’.

In one life she was a travel vlogger who had 1,750,000 YouTube subscribers and almost as many people following her on Instagram, and her most popular video was one where she fell off a gondola in Venice. She also had one about Rome called ‘A Roma Therapy’.

In one life she was a single parent to a baby that literally wouldn’t sleep.

In one life she ran the showbiz column in a tabloid newspaper and did stories about Ryan Bailey’s relationships.

In one life she was the picture editor at the National Geographic.

In one life she was a successful eco-architect who lived a carbon-neutral existence in a self-designed bungalow that harvested rain-water and ran on solar power.

In one life she was an aid worker in Botswana.

In one life a cat-sitter.

In one life a volunteer in a homeless shelter.

In one life she was sleeping on her only friend’s sofa.

In one life she taught music in Montreal.

In one life she spent all day arguing with people she didn’t know on Twitter and ended a fair proportion of her tweets by saying ‘Do better’ while secretly realising she was telling herself to do that.

In one life she had no social media accounts.

In one life she’d never drunk alcohol.

In one life she was a chess champion and currently visiting Ukraine for a tournament.

In one life she was married to a minor Royal and hated every minute.

In one life her Facebook and Instagram only contained quotes from Rumi and Lao Tzu.

In one life she was on to her third husband and already bored.

In one life she was a vegan power-lifter.

In one life she was travelling around South America and caught up in an earthquake in Chile.

In one life she had a friend called Becky, who said ‘Oh what larks!’ whenever anything good was happening.

In one life she met Hugo yet again, diving off the Corsican coast, and they talked quantum mechanics and got drunk together at a beachside bar until Hugo slipped away, out of that life, mid-sentence, so Nora was left talking to a blank Hugo who was trying to remember her name.

In some lives Nora attracted a lot of attention. In some lives she attracted none. In some lives she was rich. In some lives she was poor. In some lives she was healthy. In some lives she couldn’t climb the stairs without getting out of breath. In some lives she was in a relationship, in others she was solo, in many she was somewhere in between. In some lives she was a mother, but in most she wasn’t.

She had been a rock star, an Olympian, a music teacher, a primary school teacher, a professor, a CEO, a PA, a chef, a glaciologist, a climatologist, an acrobat, a tree-planter, an audit manager, a hair-dresser, a professional dog walker, an office clerk, a software developer, a receptionist, a hotel cleaner, a politician, a lawyer, a shoplifter, the head of an ocean protection charity, a shop worker (again), a waitress, a first-line supervisor, a glass-blower and a thousand other things. She’d had horrendous commutes in cars, on buses, in trains, on ferries, on bike, on foot. She’d had emails and emails and emails. She’d had a fifty-three-year-old boss with halitosis touch her leg under a table and text her a photo of his penis. She’d had colleagues who lied about her, and colleagues who loved her, and (mainly) colleagues who were entirely indifferent. In many lives she chose not to work and in some she didn’t choose not to work but still couldn’t find any. In some lives she smashed through the glass ceiling and in some she just polished it. She had been excessively over-and under-qualified. She had slept brilliantly and terribly. In some lives she was on anti-depressants and in others she didn’t even take ibuprofen for a headache. In some lives she was a physically healthy hypochondriac and in some a seriously ill hypochondriac and in most she wasn’t a hypochondriac at all. There was a life where she had chronic fatigue, a life where she had cancer, a life where she’d suffered a herniated disc and broken her ribs in a car accident.

There had, in short, been a lot of lives.

And among those lives she had laughed and cried and felt calm and terrified and everything in between.

And between these lives she always saw Mrs Elm in the library.

And at first it seemed that the more lives she experienced, the fewer problems there seemed to be with the transfer. The library never felt like it was on the brink of crumbling or falling apart or at risk of disappearing completely. The lights didn’t even flicker through many of the changeovers. It was as though she had reached some state of acceptance about life – that if there was a bad experience, there wouldn’t only be bad experiences. She realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery.